The Role of Bombers in World War II (WW2HRT_23-07)

[Music] thank you it's going to be a long program tonight we've got good speakers principal speaker our historian is Williamson Murray now a little while ago he handed me his resume and I was confronted with a decision was the program going to consist of reading his extremely incredible resume or was I going to Breeze through it too fast and get on with the program and I think I'm going to have to Breeze through it too fast published seven books a strategy for defeat of the luftwaffe the change in the European balance of power uh the luftwaffe 1933-34 German military Effectiveness air operations report on the Gulf War air war in the Persian Gulf Air war in 1914-45 he's co-authored four major Works he's edited 10 more Major Works his Major Works in progress World War One History Military adaptation problems of adaptation and War a military history of the Civil War the iran-iraq war 1980 to 88 Grand strategy in its historical Origins and its problems uh he's published a total in the list year of 59 I think there's probably more ranging in topics from uh getting at the Guernica Mist a myth Munich 1938 a military confrontation uh strategy of the phony war or re-evaluation German response to victory in Poland uh Ultra some thoughts on its impact on the second world war German doctor in 1930 1918 to 39 I'm getting tired just reading it where did you get the time to do all this my God and the list goes on and on in any case what I'm getting to is we have a very distinguished historian with us tonight so let's welcome Williamson Murray of course you could argue that in terms of my job resume that I couldn't hold a job start off with a little Churchill story I think my favorite one and a lesson for today given the sort of attitude that too many seen uh educated Americans have uh in April 1938 Churchill was uh giving a speech in the House of Commons about how Britain needed more air defense and in the middle of the speech uh one of the back benchers cried out how much is enough church WIll pause for a minute he said well that reminds me of the story of the man who received a telegram from Brazil saying your mother-in-law dead wire instructions paused for a second said and and so the man wired back embalmed cremate Barry at Sea take no chances laughs let me Begin by saying a few words about the framework of what I'm going to talk about in terms of combined bomber offensive uh studs Turtle coined the phrase good War and let me say as a veteran of Vietnam War there's no such thing as a good War World War II was a necessary War not a good War a necessary War and it was necessary because of the very nature of the Nazi German regime and I've been a student of German history for the past 40 years and in effect the only way that Germany could be defeated was by the most ruthless and terrible of measures I would suggest to you that there were a number of major campaigns each one of which played a crucial role not by itself decisive in victory in the second world war and those campaigns were obviously the Eastern Front um the battle of the Atlantic the invasion of Europe uh the war in the Mediterranean and not least of all the Strategic bombing Campaign which I regard as one of the uh most uh important campaigns of the second World War let me emphasize to you that um it was also from the point of view of those who waged it and we have a number of the veterans up here one of the bloodiest campaigns of the second world war from an American point of view in fact more members of the Army Air Forces died flying aircraft over uh Germany and against the Japanese that died in the Marine Corps in the Second World War um it was a messy campaign in the sense that it had no clear decisive victories it involved just the way the first world war had involved a massive war of attrition except in this case it was a war of attrition that involved not only large numbers of human beings in the air and obviously on the ground but in terms of the huge losses in aircraft that took place during the second World War and simply in terms of what those losses involved let me just give you one little figure that my research doing the study of of uh air operations in the second world war absolutely astonished me that in 1943 5 000 Americans died air crew died and 20 000 were were injured just in aircraft accidents in the continental United States just in accidents that did not did not involve any combat with either the Japanese or the America or the Germans um and let me let me say that in terms of what it did the discussions uh that revolve around Hamburg and Dresden as being absolutely horrendous occasions are absolutely correct they were but unfortunately they were necessary to defeat as I said the most evil regime I think that the 20th century managed to produce which is saying a great deal uh in fact let me mention ask how many of you have seen the HBO special called conspiracy nobody in here has seen it probably one of the most important films on the second world war ever done it stars uh Kenneth abrana anybody heard of him uh tushy I can't remember his first name the American actor Stanley Stanley stushi it's a movie about something called the Bonsai conference anybody in here know what the Von say conference was January 1942 the leaders of of of a number of the uh crucial bureaucratic organizations of Third Reich met uh in a a building which still stands and you can visit it's a museum now to discuss uh the final solution and how one was actually going to make uden Europe uden fry and what was discussed in this meeting and we have the transcript from it on which both the German play and then eventually the movie Conspiracy was made you can get it from Netflix or you can buy it from amazon.com and if you want to understand why the second world war was fought and why it was necessary to do things like Hamburg and Dresden it's well worth seeing let me say start off by giving a brief background to the Strategic bombing campaign there is a sort of a truism out there that historians Bandy around truism by historians that don't understand War military history that military organizations study the last war and that's why they do badly in the next one I have spent 40 years studying military institutions and they don't study the last war they study what makes them feel good good what justifies their Force structure what justifies the weapons they want to buy uh and it is unfortunately a harsh fact of the 20th century and I think going to be a harsh Factor the 21st century that military organizations will never be prepared fully for the war that they're asked to fight uh and and unfortunately most of them will take in preconceived notions and an attempt to make those preconceived notions fit the reality of the battlefield of the airspace really good military organizations go into conflicts and adapt their pre-war Doctrine and vision of what war is going to look like to reality but unfortunately in terms of looking at the 20th century and the military institutions that I've studied most of them take the other path three sort of approaches to air War before the second world war the German British an American U.S Army Air corps let me just say a few words about all three the Germans unfortunately looked very closely at the actual conduct of operations in the first world war and the result was they built an Air Force that was far more broadly prepared for the second world war than any other Air Force in the world uh and let me also stress it was an Air Force that was prepared to do strategic bombing but the Germans didn't understand what nobody understood in 1939 or 1938 was how complex and difficult it was going to be and how many aircraft it was going to take to actually execute a strategic uh uh um uh bombing campaign and that had to do with of course something which we have discovered in Iraq and Afghanistan that no matter how good your technology how good your preparation the enemy always has a vote your enemy will always have options that you have not prepared for or thought about the British prepared for strategic bombing aimed at populations their belief was that strategic bombing aimed to break the morale and of opponent would work and actually it did during the second world war those sort of military histories had argued that the British strategic bombing did not harm German morale sheer and utter nonsense as the German cities collapsed around the workers large numbers of of workers went absent and yet of course there was no Revolt who was going to revolt against a regime which offered you the choice of either continuing to work or if you wanted to make a a statement you got to go to buchenwald and most Germans understood what uh that that uh that meant U.S Army Air Corps and then Air Forces um got some things very right got some things very wrong what they got right was an understanding of what I'd call the huge infrastructure required to build up a great uh um Air Force and that and it's a very famous incident which I I think indicates why Roosevelt was a great President George Marshall who is clearly the Great American General of the second world war great strategist great military thinker uh and and simply a brilliant organizer was appointed um to be the assistant chief of staff at the United States Army in 1938 attended his first meeting with Roosevelt in early October 1938 in which Rosa was talking about increasing the the number of airplanes available to uh the U.S Army Air corps at the time and at the end of the meeting uh Roosevelt said well what do you think George and General Marshall said it's General Marshall Mr President not George and and it's all nonsense because ten thousand airplanes doesn't were no good you have to have the bases you have to have the air crew you have to have the training facilities it requires a huge infrastructure most of the people at the meeting thought that General Marshall had ended his career for obvious reasons and I think it speaks extraordinarily well of Roosevelt as a man who understood that if you're going to fight a war if you're going to lead a successful operation as president you need subordinates who will tell you the truth and will tell you what needs to be done not people who will say yes sir two bags full or three bags full strategic bombing of course began in summer of 1940 and particularly over the winter of 1940-41 with the luftwaffe bombing Targets in Britain there were a number of lessons which both bomber command and Eighth Air Force could have learned and did not learn and in particular what could have been Learned was that again as I suggested to you the enemy has a vote the British determined on the basis that somehow the German population was different than their population because their population of course had worn up uh against the bombing in 1940 and 41 very well the Germans would collapse under a strategic bombing campaign aimed at the population now they also had a problem in that British Doctrine had never foreseen the need for an air daylight air campaign in which self-protecting bomber formations would fly deep into Germany and almost immediately in 1940 they were forced to bomb at night and what they discovered in the summer of 1941 was the bombing at night was a matter of a good deal of guesswork absolutely had to have technological support which they did not have and that even when the technological support began to become available in 1942 you were going to have to hit what was called at the time area targets namely cities and in 1942 bomber command was taken over by an individual named bomber Harris who understood both the nature of the technology and the nature of what was required and also possessed what I think all great commanders possess a ruthless willingness to drive his command as far and as fast and in some cases such as late 1943 and early 1944 too far and Harris was helped by the fact that in 1943 increasing technological age such as a radar uh ground reading radar from bombers uh and uh um uh um long-range guidance devices based on radio beams became available and first class aircraft by 19 early 1943 bomber command was getting the finest bomber the second world war the Lancaster or at least a European theater of operations and some other additional aircraft to Halifax in particular which was a pretty good bomber and let me put the first slide on okay um there has been some very interesting historical work on the second world war over the past um uh uh 10 15 years spring of 1943 bomber command began to have a a a a enormous effect it's it's a period in which the British were hit hitting called the battle of the Roar the main major German cities in the Roar and the result of that is very clearly it broke brought the expansion because here is the actual course of German production from that point on through the rest of the war it brought germ the expansion of the German war economy to a halt and uh again in terms of the various things that I have written I did not have that available to me I never saw that aspect of the Strategic bombing survey the evidence for 1944 in particular Target structures such as aircraft production and oil and certain other areas is very clear this makes it clear the whole German economy basically was brought to a halt in the spring of 1943 and before Eighth Air Force began its major bombing everyone has to remember that Eighth Air Force really begins to appear on the scene in 1942 it carries out a number of missions against Targets in in France deeper and deeper into France but the bombing of German targets really begins uh in April and May of 1943 and the number of bombers involved were usually about 100 120 and the argument of the Eighth Air Force Commander General Ira Aker was that such a a that until Eighth Air Force disposed of 300 bombers that he could operationally send over Germany that in fact it it would not send over big enough formations to defend themselves against German Fighters and that is not was not available until Eighth Air Force until the summer of 1943. now unfortunately the two's book makes it very clear that what bomber command was doing was destroying the the transportation network of of German industry and the roar which was essential to getting coal out and without coal the rest of the German economy simply was incapable of carrying the burden of production now one of the great problems with air campaigns and we've been waging them now for uh 60 odd years is that you don't get the evidence of their true effect until the war is over and so it is understandable that Harris and bomber command for a whole variety of reasons did not understand how badly they were harming the German economy the result was they moved on to a series of other targets beginning in suburb of 1943 the Hamburg raid being the clearest example which was a devastating psychological blow to the German economy and impacted if you will the the willingness of the German population to see the war through uh to an end but not did not have the same economic effect uh and then beginning in the fall of 1943 bomber command tried to take Berlin out and while it managed to smash Berlin from one end to the other uh as one of the senior bomber command uh um Pathfinders and individual named DC Bennett in fact the highest ranking Airmen to fly uh missions over uh Europe and flecky flew missions through the from from the time he took over Pathfinders in 1942 he he probably threw four or five missions a a month to check up on how well his Pathfinders were dropping their Bobs and I sort of sort of wonderful Insight uh um uh his uh comment in an oral interview made in the 1960s early 1970s was he said if I were in charge of the RAF today and had to do an air campaign I would make every air Vice Marshall fly on active operations and for everyone you killed you'd save 200 air crew lives and the guy sitting up here probably have a sense of of of what I'm talking about of course General Doolittle did fly on active operations um General Ira acre could not for a very interesting reason he had been briefed in on Ultra and if you were briefed in on Ultra you could not fly on any active operations because of the danger that you might get captured by the Germans ate the Air Force in terms of its operations really begins in the summer of 1943. uh and I think the sort of great moment of of Awakening should have come on the 17th of August 1943 when two large formations of Eighth Air Force bombed Regensburg and schweinfert and suffered close to 30 percent casualties in one Mission 60 bombers going down by the time the luftwaffle was through it again from my perspective as a military historian given what was known about the luftwaffe and given the preconceptions um the first wine fruit was thoroughly understandable you had to find out what you the nature of your opposition was going to be and schweinfert was deep in Germany but not that deep and it had to be done what is extraordinary for my perspective as a military historian is that the need for a long-range escort fighter remained at sort of the sixth to eighth position in higher Acres list of priorities through to the second schweinfert which was occurred in October of 1943 and which was an even bigger disaster out of the uh out of the bombers that took place 60 were shot down what of course was not written into the record of the official histories was another 40 were written off on returning and that out of the entire force of somewhere around 240 250 bombers I can't remember exactly now um I think only something like 20 were undamaged Justin at now in fact that was one raid over what was called uh um uh sort of the bloody week in which eight the Air Force came close to losing in one week one third of its Force structure No Air Force can support that and there is some suspicion among military historians we don't write about it because we can't prove it that there was very clearly a crew refusal an indication among the crews that they simply weren't going back to schweinford unless they were going to be escort Fighters um and then you know there's a there's a wonderful old saying out there God takes care of drunks uh Irishmen in the United States of America P-51 showed up at the end of 1943 and by February of 1944 we were able to escort our bombers deep into Germany and what took place again I'll show you the numbers in a minute what took place was an enormous Battle of attrition that lasted from mid-February 1944 until May of 1944 in which crew losses and we'll see this throughout the whole period crew losses and bomber losses were approximately 30 percent per month there is a reason why the Memphis Bell was celebrated for completing its 25th Mission uh in July of 1943 it's because it was the first crew to actually make it through there was a reason 25 missions were selected in terms of you had to fly 25 missions and and then you could go home although they eventually started raising those numbers as our veterans will will mention um because in 1942 before 1943 the best guesses were that this would be a a perfect usage in which all the crews and all the repair planes would be used up in 25 missions in fact the first uh 30 first bomb group that took 30 b-17s over to England of that 30 bombers and Crews 29 were shot down over Germany 29 out of 30. those are the kinds of odds um the movie Memphis Belle of course managed for those of you who saw it managed to squeeze into one raid every bad thing that ever happened and ate the Air Force um so somewhat of an exaggeration but what they absolutely got right was that the crews were all 18 19 and 20. let me uh okay let me let me move on to some some some some some numbers because I think the numbers show quite a bit this is the production race beginning uh in uh first half of 1940 between the British Germans and Americans of course what's really interesting is is how far a lead the British had and what one of the major factors in the Battle of Britain was a fact that by the end of the Battle of Britain the British were turning out fighters in in nearly twice the number uh that the Germans were now the really big number and again I think you have to understand that the numbers here and I don't know why I never carried this graph into 44. I I did the book in one year which I swear I'd never do again and I've done two more in one year you know um uh this graph is going in this this is a U.S production it's going in this direction it's it it everything uh that involves the United States by 1944 in fact one of the historians of of of the Strategic bombing offensive said the United States turned out Bond was turning out bombers by 1944 like candy bars here's the numbers take a look at it was just the end of 19. this is this is the last half average for 1943. we're turning out um uh 1 000 for engine bombers every month for those of you who know about Willow Run which was Ford Motor Company's answer to to World War II problems um two mile Factory which started off with a tail assembly and at the other end came became a v24 we mass produced and talking to a luftwaffe pilot in 1990 he said you know when I saw my first shutdown B-17 went through the fuselage I said these guys can't make anything they haven't machined off the bulkheads and I went back to my officer's quarters and I sat down and I thought for a minute I thought oh wait a minute why do you need to machine off off bulkheads and waste time oh these guys are going to give us some trouble um now let me let me show you the next set of slides which are based on on official figures eight the air force figures and uh uh luftwaffe I was very lucky I did the luftwaffe book in a year because uh all of luftwaffe records were burned by the chief of history in the last three days the Second World War I drank large amounts of vodka and then having burned all the luftwaffe records he committed suicide what was left however were all of the maintenance and production records and as a form of Air Force maintenance officer I I was going to say it was a pagan but you know you could finish finish it off and so let me show you some of the numbers that were in those records aircraft written off 8th Air Force 1943 heavy bombers and I think you can see the rising number of bombers written off and the fact that we are running close to 20 25 each month being written off now let me show you the frightening figure eight Air Force crew losses 1943 per month 37 38 34 back up to 30 percent now what's extraordinary from my perspective as a military historian is the fact that with those losses look at the number of Crews available we're turning out Cruz and again you can ask the gentleman up here how they did it but it is an extraordinary story now of course the war wasn't over then here the German fighter losses and one of the things which I found somewhat surprising is that in fact very clearly Eighth Air Force did shoot down a hell of a lot of German airplanes you know one of the things that historians have minimized is the contribution that ate the Air Force Gunners made to shooting down large numbers of luftwaffe aircraft and these are um these are fighter losses as a percentage of what was available and again you can see uh um the October air battles um particularly heavy fighter pilot losses again quite a bit under American losses but you got to remember that of course we were turning out new fighter Crews and new um uh bomber Crews with huge numbers of training hours which the Germans were not not training out their new pilot so what they are beginning to lose in this period is they are trained pilots who are being replaced by pilots who uh in fact by 1944 into 1944 have 75 hours that includes in the in fact so badly were they trained I talked to 1 8 the Air Force fighter pilot who shot down a bf-109 that was flying crab way in the air because he didn't know enough to realize that the torque of the engine was was was putting his his aircraft flying straight and level uh crab wise and that he needed it to adjust his Rudder but again you're putting a kid 17 year 18 year old kid who's got no flying experience up against people who had 300 hours by the end of again see the numbers 15 percent 14 percent per month I hear the here here the numbers for the year though overall the luftwaffe um 140 percent pilot losses over the course of the year now this is what I was talking to you about a minute ago in terms of the huge air battle that has waged and these are the heavy bomber losses the crew losses in this period are about 30 percent right through to here and then in beginning in April we see a huge drop off to this point most of the losses in 15th and eight and this is just eight therefore it's not 15. um most of the losses are due to fighter planes fighter pilots losses on this end are increasingly due to Flack German fighter pilot losses look at this for a five-month period 99 loss I the way I put it in the luftwaffe book is a young American in 1942 had a better chance to survive the second world war by joining the Marine Corps and fighting the Pacific then joining Eighth Air Force and flying a bomber over Europe a young German had a better chance to survive the second world war by joining the Waffen SS and fighting on the East and front and then flying with the luftwaffe again sort of our sort of picture of air wars it's something clean and fewer casualties and the results I think of these graphs show a very different uh picture in terms of of uh why at least from my perspective the Air Force Memorial in Washington instead of celebrating uh peacetime maneuver of Air Force fighter pilots should be celebrating the guys that flew in b-17s and b-24s 1944 in terms of sort of the direct impact of what strategic bombing could do um uh there was a huge food fight in March of 1944 about whether strategic bombers should be turned over to Eisenhower to support the invasion or the way the bomber Barons Harris and spots want to do which is just keep bombing whatever they wanted to bomb this went all the way up to Churchill in Roosevelt and the answer came back down you will you will obey Eisenhower and what Eisenhower's the deputy Supreme Allied Commander was an Airman named Tedder who's probably one of the two best Airmen in the second world war in the ETO the other being Doolittle argued for was a in April and May a massive campaign against the transportation network of Western France and this is this is the graph of what happened uh with the beginning in April a massive attacks on the German Transportation Network actually the French Transportation network uh in May and June of 1944. the railroads most of the bridges taken out ninth Air Force somebody in the group I think is a ninth Air Force not in this group but back there and Ninth Air Force played a huge role in in those attacks along with the British fighter bombers and p-47s um uh now it's very interesting very it's one of those things that as a historian say oh that's obvious yeah it's obvious only when somebody says hey why didn't one hole was left in the transportation plan nobody thought about the possibility of the Germans using the uh the sane River and the barges on it to move stuff down the sane River to supply the Battlefront in Normandy and so the Germans had a free ride and one of the explanations I think is quite strong as to why the breakout occurs on the Le on the American right flank and not the British is because it was the least well supplied logistically by the Germans given the fact that the supplies were coming down the same no railroad traffic um let me I think actually oh yeah sort of this is a general sort of loss of German fighter pilots and you can see why the Germans lost the air War let me sum up give you a a few uh sort of major uh points and then we can turn it over to our wonderful crew of veterans what are the Strategic bombing campaign do I think one of the problems it estimating it was that when the second world war was over the Airmen claimed they'd won the war uh and you still find uh down at Maxwell Air Force Base having spent a year down there and I go back there occasionally to lecture Airmen who say well yeah it's all very good but you know we really uh we really won the second world war um not all Airmen uh in fact there's a wonderful exchange my my year that I spent down there um a uh a uh General acre came down and gave a talk to the faculty about how air air could have won the second world war by itself and at the end of the lecture one of my colleagues got up and said General anchor that's wonderful talk let me just ask you one question say given that everything had been put into the Air Force and we had no Army and and minimal stuff for the Navy and you got everything you wanted for the massive air assault in 1943 and Germany had collapsed who had an Army on a European continent to take advantage of that situation Acres said the Russians never never thought of that um the air campaign is important because of what it did in fact it's a young historian in Britain and I've just reviewed his proposal for Cambridge and told them forgot God's sake let him write this book and give him a lot of money we historians cheat you know in that way um the air war is crucial because of course it it played to our strengths and um attack German weaknesses that we were able and and to a lesser extent the British we were able to focus on a massive technological campaign uh against Germany one which they were not particularly well positioned to reply to particularly after they had invaded the Soviet Union um it had a number of direct impacts on the Germans what I've showed you particularly in terms of bomber commands attack on the roar in 1943 really stopping the expansion of the German war economy huge in winning the second world war or at least cutting down the casualties of the second world war but it also in terms of the campaign itself was enormously effective in shutting down German oil production petroleum production synthetic oil production one of our our veterans flew with 15th Air Force against Palestine in 1944 shutting down the Romanian oil production and one of the sort of signal marks of that was the fact that the huge German increase in in aircraft production in 1944 a Fighters was absolutely useless because they had no fuel to put in the fighters but I couldn't train the uh the youngsters who wanted to fly uh Fighters and they couldn't even Supply the fighters uh and on the ground its impact I think is best summed up by the fact that when the Soviets over ran Silesia in uh in February of 1944 excuse me February 45 uh the Germans had a thousand tanks and various Panzer divisions but no fuel and a tank is no more than a large obvious Foxhole above ground in a much easier Target than uh guys dug into the ground indirect effects were enormous too it's very clear because we have the German records of the German uh secret police the SD secret Heights needs uh it had a huge impact on German morale and workers who are worried about their families or worried about what's going on at home or not get getting enough sleep or simply not workers really capable of doing the kind of work that war production requires also had the huge impact of the Germans deploying for reasons that really reflected the ideology of the Nazi party and of Adolf Hitler's desire a huge number of anti-aircraft Guns by 1940 spring or 1944 the Germans had somewhere around 20 000 High Velocity 88 105 120 millimeter cannons firing huge amounts of shells into the sky over the right and and they knew in 1942 that they were not cost effective took something like 18 000 shells from an 88 to actually hit and damage a B-24 B-17 at 25 000 feet now again in terms of of the psychology of the crews I think none of them were happy to have this stuff exploding all around them but it was enormously cost ineffective and if you think would 10 000 88 guns uh have had any impact on Normandy if you talked to any of the ground guys uh you better believe it would have and oh by the way these twenty thousand anti-aircraft guns and all of the radar and everything were manned by about half a million German soldiers so again those people who wring their hands about the terrible killing of German uh civilians which it did it killed German civilians that was part of the whole purpose uh missed the fact that without that strategic bombing campaign 500 000 German soldiers would have found employment somewhere else and that somewhere else would have been both on the Eastern front and uh in Italy and in Normandy and I don't know whether I've talked far too long but probably not too long but we'll stop there and and turn it over to our veterans tonight for the veterans part of the program we have four Veterans of the Eighth Air Force Don Stone uh raise your hand was in the Minnesota National Guard in Olivia and he was mobilized with the National Guard in February of 1941 went to California went to Kodiak Alaska but before Pearl Harbor he wanted to realize a dream become a fighter pilot in the Navy the Navy wouldn't take him because he didn't have two years of college so I applied for the Army and the Army wouldn't take him because he wasn't good enough he had a cavity and before Pearl Harbor you had to be perfect so after Pearl Harbor he applied again and the Air Force was willing to take people less than perfect and he was able to go to Flight Training he completed his B-17 pilot training in 1943 and uh and went to England with a 103rd Bomb Group Gordon batdorf was a P-47 pilot grew up in North Minneapolis he went to the university for University of Minnesota for two years enlisted on November 11 1942 as an aviation Cadet graduated the 3rd of July 1942 and arrived in Europe on the in December of 1942 via the Queen Mary uh we were floating in the Hudson River in December with among the ice on a boat and we got off and went up at a dock and it was a mile long we thought we walked down it I walked up a step and I thought I walked into the Nicollet Hotel it was absolutely beautiful well it was a Queen Mary and they told me to go over to that desk I went over there and I picked up a card and I said sweet B on Deck seven I thought wow am I going to have a ride this time I got to my Suite we had a bedroom there were 16 of us in one bedroom foreign okay uh it's great to be an officer okay I went over on the Queen Mary too yeah and uh I was I did they didn't have any bedrooms there I was sleeping and sleeping on the floor okay uh that was Calvin Garrison grew up in Saint Paul he was a radio Gunner on the B on a B-17 he enlisted in October of 1942 he went to radio School in Madison Wisconsin went to Gunnery school and in October of 43 he went overseas and served with the 100 306th Bomb Group on a B-17 and our next veteran is uh Cliff uh degree he grew up in Hendricks Minnesota was drafted in 1904 in early 1943 was initially in the signal Corps then went to Gunnery school he was overseas in August of 44 and he served with the 457th Bomb Group on a B-17 as a B-17 pilot you trained with a crew and you went overseas together do you want to talk about your crew your skills and your attitudes towards each other we were uh put together as a crew in Ephrata Washington and we all used to call it Fredo Washington as one of the hell holes of the Air Force yeah it was not so much very sand and anyway the we were assigned our crew we didn't get a chance to pick them but fortunately we did wind up with a heck of a good crew yeah they uh co-pilot from Hartford Connecticut he was an ex-cop we had a navigator who was a one of the crack Navigators of the Eighth Air Force he was from New York City our Bombardier was from Milwaukee that guy could tip a half a gallon of beer that Bottoms Up and then the rest of the the crew they were from uh they were from colleges they were from uh they were from farms but we all came together as a family and we all you know as you gather together and you go through training you go through uh we got our own crew we Flew Over the we flew the Atlantic as one of the fruit in our group that got our own aircraft so we formed a very integral unit and that unit grew as a family we knew each other we worked together we flew as a crew from the time we left uh Ephrata Washington to the time we got to uh to England through all through combat we flew together we went on uh 48-hour passes to to London well the officers you would go by themselves or the uh and the Airmen would pair off by themselves and I uh we used to kind of pair off two or two at a time I I used to play off with my my navigator and my Bombardier he didn't particularly pair I want to pair off with me because I didn't drink beer and he did so he he paired off of my uh with my co-pilot but anyway uh we went through the whole War together and they only lost one member of my crew and he uh was wounded on a mission down near Asher slave and near Munich he called and says I'm hit so uh we were under attack at the moment so we left him there until uh until we got out of the uh there to go out of the fight my wage Gunner came up and uh gave him a shot of morphine and he and that day we uh we got hit with them with fighter attacks we got hit at the uh okay we'll come back to that point okay right now what was the average age of your crew we started out I think we only have my radio operator was about uh oh I think he was about 19 years old and then we scaled on up to uh I think our oldest one was uh our tail Gunner he was uh I think he was 28 at the time three of our crew members were married the rest of us were uh we're waiting on and you were about 22 at the time I was 22 at the time [Music] yeah okay do you have a choice in in your assignment on the crew no I had no choice I was you're going to be about church and that that's what that was no okay no choice can you briefly describe your crew and the ages of your crew our crew was quite different uh for me our crew is quite different from the other Crews most of the crews were put together by a clerk in the orderly room that would say this is your crew you've gone the list and he said this is your crew in our case our pilot had been in the been a flying Sergeant he'd been in the war in the Army about three years before the war and so he by the time he became our pilot he had checked out on every aircraft in the air air court that time so we had a older crew our pilot was uh about 27 years old my engineer was 28 years old we called him the pops of the crew then uh I think the youngest was probably 20 but the uh I was 22 so by and large wave that's a mix of our cruise a very very close crew by the way okay well I don't mean to add this here uh our pilot came around and interviewed three or four people for each position and that was unique so I felt that I was very fortunate being assigned to the William T Robbie Robertson crew now you were a ball turret Gunner under the bottom of the plane that's right and can you describe what it was like to be in a Plexiglas bubble the sound of 250 caliber machine guns the smell of the of the rounds what was that experience you know what most guys think the ball Turf is the worst position on the plane well I must have been a little bit unusual because I felt very secure in that ball turret that heavy Plex of glass the heavy steel I felt sheltered from the Flack and what I would do during the heavy flank I'd get my ball going around and around and around and the flag would go bing bing bing against the flat against the ball and bounce off now if you went down that was quite a different thing but the way I I've uh I I like the ball curve you know I talked to Cal here and he said he wanted no part of that position okay so I like the ball okay can you describe uh your crew briefly well uh I was a probably the youngest that was 22 years old and uh I hadn't been on a crew before that and uh so they decided they wanted a better radio operator radio was my kind of hobby before I won the service and they were shifted from one to another and so I had a pile that was a wild one the second one I had the second crew I mean he was great for chasing the antelope and knocking over uh Haystacks with a prep prop wash and see how close they could get to washing his nose on the on the uh what's called out in South Dakota all that I was kind of glad to get overseas so I could get out and bail out you know say so uh but he was a great guy I mean as far as I was concerned so uh that's about all I could say about my crew but you liked him better on the ground oh I love the guy yeah yeah I I I in fact I talked to him here about a week ago you know see and there's only three of us left and so uh it's kind of nice okay how old were you at the time 22 22. he just turned 22. now you had a unique gun position on the B-17 as a radio operator you want to talk about that briefly I had the position that was probably uh the least effective in other words in fact that was eliminated shortly after uh words uh and uh it was a it was a hatch in the radio room and it was uh right back of the Bombay and you had a gun that pointed up and uh so then you uh I used to knock the wires off the the radio they would come back that way you know see and I could have saw the tail that's off too I guess I never got to that far okay can you you know you had a you fairly unique position just about everybody on the plane had some kind of a window yeah sometimes like the guys in the front of the plane had maybe more window than they wanted well but uh you were the radio operator you're kind of stuck in the middle of the fuselage and all this stuff going on around you what what was it like for you there well it was kind of odd now I had a little window of one side there you know see so uh what do they do uh they they put a suit in there so I could put chaff off you know say to uh goof up the the anti-aircraft shattering the strips of aluminum yeah I used to throw them on through the top all of a sudden they took away my window and put a little what'd you call it I couldn't see I said all I could see was everything on top of me and I'll see that was it okay and what were your duties as a radio operator on it well on a plane a radio operator uh was just what it was supposed to be I I didn't do a lot of operating and got into the uh formation and if you went down on the channel that's when they really needed you they got to get a try and Division and they had a camera on the bottom of the radio room there that I had to turn that on whenever they uh uh Bombardier holler bombs away you know and that sort of thing so uh otherwise I I I didn't have an awful lot to do I I had to look into the Bombay to make sure the bombs are all left there after uh they dropped the bombs and that sort of thing a unique position or at least in our panel you're you're a fighter pilot you're an escort pilot on a P-47 you haven't asked me about my crew this is the question this is the question no what I wait a minute now you're getting ahead of me here let me ask the question okay remember what I want you to talk about is the types of men that became fighter pilots yourself the men that you flew with and if you want to talk about your crew you had a crew chief and maybe talk about the relationship you had with your crew chief and the ground crew that kept your plane going well that was that was a wonderful relationship but you know the crew chief the ground crew but in the year I was a pilot the co-pilot the Gunnery officer the Navigator the radio operator in fact this this is a model of my airplane a lot of people don't know what a thunderbolt looks like so I thought I'd bring one along and let you take a look at it uh I'm not sure how we were picked as a fighter pilot I went through uh central air command Kelly field a sex in Missouri then I went through Randolph and I think at Randolph field the instructors decide which one of their students are going either to multi-engine or single engine fortunately I was lucky enough and I went to single engine to section Missouri I graduated July 3 1942 our I went to the 60 or the 56 Fighter Group a group has three squadrons I was in the 63rd fighter Squad with a 56th Fighter Group we were the first people in the Air Force to get the P-47 Thunderbolt it was brand new off the production line it still had a lot of problems we lost 16 Pilots breaking in the airplane we went from students the test pilots overnight as a matter of fact when I walked on the field Mitchell Field I saw I said I looked there was a sergeant standing and I said what in the hell is that he said that's what you're going to be flying sir well that's what I ended up with okay it's called The Jug anything anything you want to say about its characteristics or the experience of flying it so Firepower engine power what can I tell you it's it's a great airplane to fly a lot of people talk about the P-51 Mustang which is also a great airplane I've always said if you want to have your picture taken have it taken in a P-51 if you want to survive combat fly a P-47 cover oh you had you had a unique position you were able to Fly Above and around these bomber formations sometimes over a thousand planes what was what was that like what what did it seem like well the the bombers were 23 000 feet we were anywhere from 16 to 42 000 feet where were the enemy was we ran to the enemy just about every Mission we went on incidentally I went on 64 missions and we didn't know we were doing anything great we just doing our job uh but uh what were they talking about I wasn't uh the experience of of uh your Vantage Point oh over the bomber formation I think they're moving all those planes one of the most incredible sites in the world is to see a thousand bomber formation they had three divisions the first division was b-17s the second division was the b-24s the third division was beat 17 and the three divisions were about a half a mile apart and they just you as far as you could see it was bombers and when we come in to pick up the bombers we could pick out the bombers because of the contrails and the Flack your first mission was on the 20th of December 1943 over over Bremen now you're 22. this is your first combat you're a B-17 pilot can you talk about your first mission not much to talk about because I remember I was laying in the sack that morning and uh waiting for our turn and the uh operations clerk here came in and said uh he wiped me on the rear and said it's totally you're flying today co-pilot because the co-pilot for uh Dobbs crew uh stayed at the club a little too long last night so uh so I flew a co-pilot for him and it was good it was really kind of a good break for me because it was a a chance to uh to fly to find out what the uh you know what flying a mission was like so the really uh you know after got the aircraft in the air there really wasn't too much of a copilot to do remember our Target that day was uh Frozen was over Bremen and there was a lot of a lot of flack much Fighters and I remember I was just sitting there first of all I just want to say to me because you you think you're the first one you heard about all the uh the casualties and you think you'd be scared you know what to go and the first one but strangely enough I was absolutely not scared one single bit I was too dumb to realize you know what that I would say yeah but yeah I was I was sitting there and I looking out the window and I see this four twin engine uh German uh bombers up to my right and the left and all of a sudden they opened their bombays in a whole flock of these little uh bombs came down they look like wieners and they were trying air bombing but they they completely miss us and I never saw that again but uh it was like we we never get the there were there were several uh several of my buddies went down but uh we're lucky made a bag so that was my first one baptism of Fire you've you prepared uh a summary of your missions yes and do you want to go through that for us please all right well uh our first mission was pretty routine you know uh we got a lot of flack and we had about 100 dozen holes in our plane some of them as big as that you could put your fists through them but what strikes me about the first mission was the fact that we got up in the morning knowing it's going to be our first mission we go up to Chow I don't think that person said a word we get onto a truck we go down to a plane and the plane on the nose on the plane this art said you'll never know and I thought how true how true that was the name of the plane on our first mission so it was it was that mission number one but nobody was hurt mission number two our Bombardier got a piece of flack up as Fanny and he saw uh but quarters need about that he said you know fellas I just hit her or he went through the bombs away and then he said by the way I was hit a few minutes ago with a piece of flank I think you better send some bandages down here because I'm bleeding pretty profusely and he had a pretty big hunk taken out and he was laid up for several weeks that was mission number two now mission number three that was both a tough one and a sad one we were going to rule land Germany not too far from Berlin and the uh we were first hit by Flack and it was very very accurate flag and no the flat attack was just over with and we were hit by about 50 to 60 Fighters and that's what took us and then we had a then we had a oxygen check an oxygen check is to make sure that everybody's got their oxygen tank going and so tail Gunner comes in okay wastelander okay ball turret okay radio operator okay then no response from the top turret gun and he'd hit some interference with his uh with his mic that day so Robbie said Earl if you hear me just turn your turret and no no response so Hendrickson our co-pilot goes back and he gives Earl a little tug Earl came slubbing down and then he saw the uh horse had been severed his auction hose and he died of anoxia no oxygen it was sad and he was the only one in the earliest second man of the crew that was married and it was about three weeks after his death that his wife had a baby daughter and I've been in touch with her ever since all these 60 plus years so mission number three was a rough one then we went out to another rough one when we were way uh the deputy lead flying just directly ahead of us took a direct hit and exploded you know I took a direct hit and then he pulled out of formation and then he exploded and our pilot said if he hadn't pulled out of formation we would have been going down with him too well in that mission our radio operators he had his electric suit that failed and it's uh he had no heat for about five or six hours a long time what was the air temperature up there oh 40 to 50 degrees below zero that's pretty cold and you're in an unheated aluminum tube right yeah right so uh he had no heat we got back to the base and I can still see him that evening sitting by the pot belly stove we all had those didn't we and he's rubbing his legs and he said God it was cold up there you know five maybe four years after the war I got a call from him his name is Bernie stuttman from Philadelphia and Bernie said I know you kept a diary Cliff did you record the fact that my heated suit failed and I said I sure did why do you ask it he said well I didn't go on sick call so he said no I've got a lot of problems and he said I can't get any of this uh help from the government because I didn't go on sick call so he said would you verify that I had this and I said of course I will so I did but to make a long story short Bernie had both legs amputated and an arm that's a sad sad price to pay that maynardberg was another tough mission that one oh man we lost uh let's see we lost about nine PL uh dozen planes that day I know we lost about uh over 90 men or something like that so that was a rough one so these are a few of my mission now I've elaborated on all these missions in my book uh into high school and I tell about all admissions I flew 24 of them so that that's kind of the Highlight can you talk about the experience of your first mission or any other memorable missions not not not the real memorable one we'll get to that later okay uh first mission I was nervous this could be an Aussie and it was something to matter with my uh headsets and so I was All Shook Up about that and after a while I kind of cool down and uh probably uh one of the worst missions we made was uh to a place called helper stat and deep in Germany and we lost a lot of planes on that on that mission that was a about the worst uh I I made a dozen missions in the nine and were in Germany and three were in France so uh I went to Bremen Berlin hadn't been hit by then so I never went to Berlin I went to Leipzig which was quite deep and uh a couple of missions to Bremen and uh so uh I I we uh we caught Flack and stuff like that but we were lucky we never had anybody get wounded or or killed or anything such as that and we had we come back one time and we had the land of the English based because our plane was so shot up we couldn't get back to our regular base it was on the east coast and I remember we didn't have any beer in our in our baseball we got loaded when we got in that English space so we we had a good time there for about three or four days and uh then uh when we were they took the plane back and uh so uh the lucky part was we got back and then they discovered that here uh one of the cables that went back there was severed to the point was about ready to fall apart you know and that plane would have went down just uh going back to our base you know say so that was uh probably one of the worst missions is like I say who we had so okay now the critical question was the beer warm it didn't matter let me beard it was the worst thing you've ever tasted I'll tell you if you had Lambie beer why you tasted it all could you describe a typical escort Mission from the time you were briefed in the morning until until you landed I'll make it short we knew we were going to go on a mission because the bombers are already airborne and circling and forming up and it took them a long time to get in formation to start climbing over to Europe so we knew we were going to go on a mission we'd ride our bicycles over to the Quonset hut walk in and on the wall there is a big map and if they'd put something Across the Threshold everybody would have tripped because you're looking at the map when you're coming to see what's going to happen the colonel comes in Colonel Zemke he he tells you he says for instance an example is we got a good one today we're going to cover the b-17s on a ramrod emden a ramrod is a bomber cover a plater bomber cover so the the operations officer gets up and tells us the runways we're going to use uh we take off there's 16 airplanes in a squadron so we line up one Squadron on one Runway and take off then the other quadrant takes off then the third Squadron gets up on the first run when it takes off we take off two at a time in formation the co heads out a mile and a half makes one formation we head to Europe uh the the one of the officers tells us about the airplanes that we'll probably encounter a won the 90 measure spent 109. the Abbeville kids they had yellow nose to measurements and they were really a hot outfit uh they tell us where the possible Flack is they tell us where the bombers are going to be at a specific time and one of the most important things in a briefing is time everybody in the Air Force had what they called a hack watch and the neat thing about it was that when you pull the stem out the second hand stopped on 12. and you everybody set their watch down to the second five four three two one the reason time was so important we had a 30 second win or 90 second window over the Target to pick up the bombers if we miss the bombers by more than 90 seconds you could wipe out a whole bomber formation so that's how important time was we'd pick up the bombers we'd cover them sometimes we're 10 miles ahead of them uh we were with the bombers probably 30 minutes out of the trip before the next quadrant would come in and take over we'd head home Landing was exciting because we'd get an issue on four airplanes we'd come down about 30 feet off the ground and we Shondell up drop our gear and flap land left right left right left right uh we'd go in for a briefing The Briefing wasn't much I think the bombers had a lot more detailed briefings than we did we just sit in a big room and say okay what happened one guy said well I shot down this and now that I saw a bomber go down I saw eight guys bail out uh that's about a mission they're they're uh rather straightforward and uh very very uh to the point somebody said ask me one time were you ever scared and I said damn right I was scared uh but the most the most distressing time in a mission is when you get in your airplane and strap it to your fanny and you're sitting there waiting for the flare to tell you to start engines it could be anywhere from 10 to 20 minutes and this that time when you're sitting there you've got a lot to think about am I going to come back a hero or am I going to get shot down but that's that's about it and at the end of the 20 minutes the training kicks in and you just fly the plane right yeah you're so busy there's a lot going on do you can you talk a little bit about uh the German planes and the German fighter pilots the quality any particular missions that you encountered them that are memorable well I started out early so they were damn good they were getting worse uh somebody asked can Ken Dahlberg one time he said well were the pilots getting you you were getting more victories were the pilots getting less efficient he said no he said I'd like to think that I was getting better and that jug would out dive anything in the air well toward the end of my missions we'd after we covered the bombers we'd dive down and see what we could shoot up on the deck and on one Mission we're coming down about five six hundred miles an hour and way ahead of us is a is an aired Rome and there's an airplane sitting on the end of the runway and I thought I'm fine with Zemke and I thought boy here's another victory for Zemke we Dove at that and the airplane started down the runway and took off and climbed right out of sight it was a measure Smith 262. and I understand I was blaming Hitler for being stupid but I found out today there was some mechanical difficulties but thank God that airplane didn't get into combat too much we had absolutely nothing that could compare with it the casualties would have been just humongous to your 15th Mission you became the lead pilot in the lead plane can you talk about your responsibilities what was involved in being the lead pilot that was kind of a new chapter of uh of my tour when we reached 15 it's 15 uh thank you every 15 missions we were transferred to a uh what they call a PFS squatter and my uh my crew and another crew from the 360th were transferred in this the Squadron was formed over to the 305th of chalveson we were not too happy about it because uh now we were transferred to uh the 305th we were transferred there for rations and quarters we are now no longer an integral part of the 303rd now we felt like what's his name The Man Without a country we felt like we were orphans so whenever we had to uh to lead why they would uh alert us and they would have to fly uh usually at night we get the call to fly over to moldsworth and then we would we would either lead or be Deputy lead because that time the uh the radar operation was coming into being we'd call the The Mickey set we could it was a device that would throw a beam and would come back to the uh to the aircraft uh with in the Mickey Hopper actually could read this uh return that would come back to the uh to the aircraft you would it could actually show a different return for water a different return for uh land a different return for build up areas so it it was almost like a little map so we could actually allow allow us to bomb through a to cloud cover so uh I never when we were never welcomed when we came over to the 303rd because oh again here comes that PFF crew now that means we have to go on a DP that means a long deep penetration into deep Germany or into the Poland and so uh we were we were just really uh a bunch of Orvis and the uh so I said we either either LED or a deputy lead so uh two occasions I had a Brigadier General flying my co-pilot not too many had that honor but the general Travis is uh he oftentimes would would lead the group and lead the wing in this so one of the missions we hear we we bombed Berlin and uh with General Travis in the right hand scene coming back we came a little close to the Flack area around magdeburg and yeah we hit some uh moderate flag and uh which was pretty accurate and burst of which uh blew a uh a hole in uh in the windshield showering glass all over the cockpit and all of a sudden that's the AAP either a piece of flack or a piece of glass struck Travis just above in the left temple and he uh he fell over potionless and I thought oh Shostakovich he's had it but uh about five minutes later he starts moving and he comes around and he gains a full consciousness so that I called Uh George Green my right wish operator to get to come up and uh take care of the take care of the general and put any put a bandage on him so George came up and he uh he fixed him up and he put an ace big very noticeable bandage over the general the simulator we he wasn't very talkative on the way home though but uh when he landed he exited the aircraft uh very quickly we got down I saw him down there's I was filling out the form one I see him down there the ground and the staff guard come out with all the all the staff and so the General's down there he's pointing up in the hole there and he's pointing up here you know so that uh that evening you know he was billeted over the uh the other side of uh moldsworth the base he would be abilities with the uh 427. rarely they ever did you see him over there in our end but this night we saw him over at the 359th the Squadron officers uh lounge and the big big band each time I suppose you wanted to don't let everybody know that even generals weren't impervious to uh scars of battles okay he was a he loved the battle Travis reminded me of patent and general of the the the Indian custard very much of the same mold okay love the battle whenever you walked into that briefing room and you saw Travis's name up there leading you know that it was going to be a rough one yeah well you have some guy you had you had encounters not just with German Flack but you had some very close encounters with German fighter planes and of course in the front of the whole formation whether it's 50 planes or a thousand planes you're in the front so you want to talk about some of those encounters with German Fighters yes those are the particularly on the uh the mission to uh Usher slaven we're ready for a uh a Target as a fighter field not too far from Berlin and Berlin had not yet been hit and when we uh our route took us in to uh toward Berlin and of course the Germans uh Berlin being their sacrosanct they threw up everything at us and we had Fighters well the thing is that I mean everything when when he got off the ground the first did the first Wing we got off the ground but then the weathers came in sucked in over uh over England the other Wings couldn't get off the ground and worst of all our little friends were grounded they couldn't get off so here we are we're on the way in and uh Travis is supposed to have received a recall Travis claimed I never received any recall so here we are we're on the way in and no fighter escort and uh fighter attack all the way in and I remember this one time there was a Emmy 109 you know what you know just you know exactly that he's got you in his sights somehow you just know it you feel it and all of a sudden you see the little flashes in this one of the middle of cannons and I remember I I kicked left Rudder as hard as I could to support his aim and I thought sure and I just tucked my head you know waiting for those shelves to come through the cockpit and nothing happened I says he missed when I looked out and there's a jacket hole in the in the right wing then we we made it back okay but I remember the crew chief came over to my uh my Hut that night and he said Lieutenant I just want to tell you what a lucky guy you are I said how's that he said we just pulled an unexploded 20 millimeter shell out of the gas tank so someday I might find out why that didn't explode uh we missed earlier you wanted to talk about uh the uh nickname for the 303rd Bomb Group one of those things that they often wanted to how in the heck did a group get uh named Hell's Angels well I just want to clarify one thing we had nothing to do with the black leather jacket bike riders at all and uh and I don't think they had no connection with us the name held's Angels Came about from a World War One movie that came out in the uh in the 30s starring Gene Harlow that's how we got the name Hells Angels and uh one other thing I wanted to clarify we just uh talked about the Memphis Belle the Memphis Bell was given credit for having completed 25 missions the first first one to come for 25. and they got the trip home to selling war bonds and they did a heck of a job but now the real story the real truth is that these hell the the aircraft to be 17 Hells Angels finished 25 what two days before Memphis Belle now I think the reason that the members Bell was picked is because the name Memphis Bell was probably a little more palatable to the whole crowd than Hell's Angels so that's that's a lesson to all of us to be careful when you name your airplane on your 12th mission you had a very very memorable experience can you talk can you describe that mission for us and what happened first of all if you don't mind well he mentioned that Tony Miller we had the same thing in in our tail one time and I'm just wondering some of that slave labor didn't goof up those 20 new shells you know see but uh going into my uh the mission that I got shot down on uh I forget what the target was but we were counting gonna go across France and we started the uh gain altitude over France I thought what the hell is going on here I mean after all uh didn't we go slow enough or far enough you know I mean why should some of this please didn't have Tokyo tanks maybe that's the reason so they wanted to make sure that they could so we started out and we were at about 18 000 feet and I called out some Fighters back there and they were a lot of sight pretty well but you could see the contrails the foramen and our escorts the the p-47s and p-51s used they went much slower now so they had to to go uh with back and forth like that and I called it out and we had a different tail Gunner that time I didn't care for him but anyway uh so uh yeah I said that's nothing don't worry about it well it would actually uh it was a German Fighters back there playing like you know see they were and then they all of a sudden come in well in the meantime uh I was I had the thing the thing that you could you could talk to the rest of the crew members on and stuff and and I could get England on there I mean you know too and I heard some coming through and I thought maybe it's a recall kind of a good deal you know so you got credit for you know see and uh so uh uh I should have been uh standing on my gun looking through that hatch back there and uh so uh like I say we were at about 18 000 feet and uh gain an altitude and uh I didn't know we were out of formation and uh all of a sudden I looked up there and there was a German fighter coming right down the hatch my gun was on uh on the uh safe so I couldn't get them but his uh I swear that he had guns in both ways and they were straddling me you know see the way everything was blowing up in there and I caught one of them on my left leg I still have a piece of Germany in my left leg you know see from that and uh but the thing was on fire you know see the the plane was on fire and I was supposed to bail out the the Bombay well I went to uh first of all I looked back there and here's a uh a guy standing by the hatch back there I could get out the Bombay and I looked back there where you entered the airplane and there was he stand with his chute anyway I thought what the hell did whatever you open your suit now and then there was another shoot on the floor there and uh so I I snapped mine on and I thought it's a kind of a vacate the premises you know see so I headed back there and we had a hard time pulling the pin so that we get the door open and so uh finally did it and I went right out and I I'm going to find out whether the shoot's going to open now not 500 feet over the ground you know say because there's a lot of guys lost this see so uh uh I I pulled out and I oh I've we've I must have caught a lot of of prop wash or something like that and after I got out and looked out and here's two uh shoots coming down and they're passing me in there slowly but they're full of holes well one of them one of them was that one that the fella had and he just open them like that you know say and it worked and the other one was the other one there was the waste corner and it was you know it was uh his was full of holes too so they both come down and then maybe it was a good deal because they didn't the wind didn't catch them I or uh one guy broke his leg when the wind caught him and I landed in a kind of it was a Orchard or something like that my pool Shoup went over the top of the I think it was all full of thorns and stuff and I thought well I I was supposed to bury my shooter I couldn't get the thing out of there you know see and uh so uh I didn't know where we were if we were Germany yet I know that in Germany if the civilians got a hold of you BYU we had it you know say so uh I I actually I had a bayonet with me I don't know why I carried that but I thought if I get caught in the tree or something they could cut my way out you know say but I ran over to this other fella that had his suit open because I wanted some company there you know we're always told to scatter you know but I didn't I went over to him and he was he was saying I'll never take another airplane ride you know and so he was kind of a State of Shock and I said hey come on let's go get going I said it was a fighter plane that was circling me on the way down you know see and I couldn't get him going well all of a sudden uh there was kind of little road down there and I see the a motorcycle coming up there and there's a German he was held Miranda he looked up there and he still had a shooting and I thought well gee can we and then after a while I heard hello hello everyone all around us hello you know I had it almost got a goodbye you know see it but but uh so that was it as far as being captured you know see and they come up there and point a gun at me and a barrel was about that big a rock so uh that was a part there that I don't know if you want me to continue with it with that we'll get back to the yeah how many how many of your crew got out uh we all got out we all kind of was yeah yeah and uh like I said the the um who is Connor was uh had Flack at him and I I got hit and uh so uh we uh we had it kind of rough like I say broken leg and that sort of thing and uh I know that one the co-pilot his back was bad from then on ever I mean never did for the rest of his life his his back was bad you know see from that Landing with that parachute the parachutes were a lot different than they are now you know see so but it took us down anyway in your ball turret on the bottom of the plane it was what was your view of German Flack and German Fighters well uh I got only the bottom view as you can understand and the front view I remember Hamburg was particular you mentioned Hamburg tonight your speed I never forget coming into Hamburg uh to borrow my target the Flack was absolutely so thick I swear I thought I could get out and walk on it it was that heavy and I thought we'll never never get through this so I had a great and lo and behold we got up there and their anti-aircraft Gunners were oh maybe five six hundred feet below us so we got through it just in fine shape but when you see it from your ball Church you're looking out ahead of you and you see this wall you say this is it Lord get me out of this mess today and I'll never get up here tomorrow but the next day you'll be back up there so we had a view of the Flack I think probably from the ball church that was probably better than others better than you wanted it to be better than I wanted it to be but uh uh I got an interesting uh call today I mentioned earlier about uh Earl Reinhardt our engineer this afternoon perhaps a an hour before we came over here I got a call from a young boy in Lebanon Indiana he said my name is Matthew the last name lose me right now but he said I am the grand nephew of Earl Reinhardt who is on your crew that's the one that died from anoxia and he said I wondered if I could talk to you for a few minutes so that's the kind of continuity that's still going on today after all these years were in such with all the crew many of the crew members and their families like stuttman that had the frostbite they had his legs amputators his son is in touch with me on a regular basis we get together out of this Ranch out in Utah and we've corresponded on the phone so it's a closely knit group so I don't know if they asked you a question about the Flack I had a great view of the flag wonder sometimes I would think you know Cliff but you're good you're watching a movie you know I sit there and I said this can't be for real you can see these planes go boom and they explode you know and I'm sure you felt that same way you tried using them as bombers you want to describe that mission yeah before I get that far though I just like to mention age again how young we were uh Colonel Zemke was a commander of the group and he was 27 years old a full colonel the three Squadron commanders were Majors they were 25 years old the rest of us were all in our early 20s it reminded me of one one time I was in London I went to the Officers Club I went up to the bar and there was a colonel sitting there seat next to him I found out he was a commander of a B-17 group and he said you know I I go into briefing and I look out at that group out there and they're so young they're just so young he says I look at him and I think a year ago they'd have been standing out in a field looking a mule in the ass waiting for the sun to rise now they're flying a B-17 if they were home their dad wouldn't let them have the company car um the object of fighter aircraft is to shoot down enemy Fighters or enemy airplanes and so we would go on what we call a fighter sweep and the luftwaffe wouldn't pay any attention to us so somebody in headquarters got the bright idea well let's put a bomb on them then there'll be a bomber and then it might it might upset the luftwaffe and they might come up after us so we put practice bombs on the on the airplane they had a B-24 the pilot was a captain the Bombardier was the second lieutenant we picked up the bomber at 20 23 000 feet over the wash which is north of East Anglia we got in tight formation we had our flaps down our wheels down so we could then the bombers Full Throttle were all staggering along the Bombardier says okay gentlemen get ready now unlock your Bomb release and he started telling us we're approaching and all of a sudden he said five four three two one now and we dropped the bombs and we had a beautiful pattern down there was really great it was doing a lot of damage so come the day of the big mission the pilot of the B-24 is a full kernel and the Bombardier is a major we pick him up at 20 23 000 feet at in the coast of France we're heading for an airport just outside of Paris we're in tight formation Flack it's the first time any of us had ever anything to do with Flack all of a sudden he says no no no well by the time you take your hand off the throttle unlock the Bomb release pull a bomb we've gone at least four miles there's a little city there it's just absolutely was devastated we never did hit the airport they never did that again so much so much for practice incidentally I'd like to thank you sir for your statistics I really appreciate that I only want to say doctor I'm glad we didn't know all that before we implied combat are we even scared to death Mr stolo you had some Bliss on your 31st mission do you want to talk about that uh I will in just a second what I would like to if I could just take a couple of minutes in this a.m. weather sometimes can be a worse Factor than combat this is the second kind of the second chapter to that mission to Asher slavin when the rest of the uh the Air Force couldn't get off the ground including our little friends on the way back we could see that this wall of weather over England now I thought how in the God's name are we ever going to navigate through that wall of weather so finally we decided we try to get down underneath it so we could we finally got down we were about four or five hundred feet off the ground flying formation yet and I would go along and I and I see these two tall Smoke Stacks from that factory up ahead of it and I thought boy we got to clear those and then we we got we got over them all right we got to the base okay and how the evidently the word had gone out that we were coming home Finance the uh the alert ground crew set out three phosphorus flares because we got it home we couldn't even see the runways they said one phosphorus flare at the at the Landing end of the runway they said it went further about halfway down the runway and another one about a couple hundred yards out so you could line up figure out for the landing while I was circling the uh the base trying to get in the position to do it for for the approach all of a sudden out of the soup loomed another B-17 right absolutely right for us and and I as soon as I saw him I I wheeled back and I swear I thought his props were going to chew up our underbelly they came that close I couldn't miss him by inches that close encounter almost a mid-air Collision scared to live with bejebers out of me to the point where I remember I tried to uh make a turn and push push the the rudder my left my leg doubled up like it was rubber all right so if I we did get lined up we were coming in on the approached it and then I could see the runway and by co-pilot called out B-17 underneath us holy Moses so it's higher full Boost irpm we go around again now there are other other airplanes in that traffic pattern you don't know where they were but finally the grace of God we were lined up again and we came in and we're just about coming out of the landing and Coppola again called uh B17 on the right and I remember my exact words I said to hell with it I'm setting this kite on the ground ah and we landed and I I made a couple of bumps one of the best landing I ever made but boy every every bump I made felt better than the last one but uh it's just one of the uh I understand the um I was flying the uh the aircraft uh uh The Duchess The Duchess was flying his 50th mission that day and the crew chief said now you're flying The Duchess it's we're supposed to be getting prep uh the publicity for its 50th mission so bring her back okay but anyway uh we were supposed to get the uh they had supposed to have the uh newsrial cameraman cameraman there at the base to take our picture but the the words had gone out that we were supposed to land in Southern England but again Travis said he never got the message so he came in and by the time of course we landed and of course they had already left but the uh the Associated Press uh Santa wear out to uh to WCCO in Minneapolis saying that their The Duchess of fluids 50th Mission today he was piloted by Lieutenant Donald W stolo of Olivia Minnesota and there's much been a great throw for all the neighbors and especially my folks say you know how to get get my name remember Cedric Adams yeah he had my name over there that night so just a little thing okay just quickly you want to talk about the surprise of your 31st mission 31st well I would see by the time when we started over there you're 25 we got close to 25 and then they kicked it up to 30 we got to 30 close to 30 they kicked it up to 35. and I thought oh well there's a few of us left in the original Squadron so I thought the only way that we're going to get out of here is you know they're going to carry us out so anyway we we landed uh on the uh from 31st by unfortunately a Twix had come down for bomber command saying all those we've had 30 missions could go home but thank God I didn't know that it was my last one or by I would have thought I died a thousand deaths over that Target this is hamburger and they were they were defending their oil supply dip was there I saw that day I saw Flack you're talking about 120 millimeter the big one I swear this was 155. because this stuff was it wasn't the 88s because they won the 88th verse it was the kind of person that would kind of hang this stuff when it exploded and right smack dab outside of our window it was that ugly red orange fire even in the burst and that black smoke would just rolled like this see and then would fly right through that black smoke and it was still rolling and all the guy had to do is hold his gun still and he would have blown us out of the sky but that that was the biggest flag I ever saw after you're done with your p47 you wanted to keep flying so do you want to just briefly talk about what missions you continue very briefly I wanted to I wanted to be a transport pilot I wanted to fly for Northwest Airlines so I transferred instead of coming home I transferred to a transport Squadron and I was flying Lockheed Hudson's and Lockheed lodestars all over England one day they took our twin engine airplanes away from us and they gave us Norton Norseman which is a Canadian Bush pilot airplane we flew them to Le Berger airport in France and we ended up flying in those days they didn't have a helicopters so we were the mash helicopter Pilots we take the Norton Norsemen and we'd fly up the sand or someplace we landed a makeshift airstrip we'd pick up three litter patients and we'd have a medical orderly and a co-pilot seat we fly them back to the main hospital and laborers Airport uh we'd make three maybe four trips a day and it was the most wonderful satisfying flying I've ever done in my life and I'm I'm grateful for the fact that I had the opportunity to do that you were a pow at first install log Loof six stalog loaf four then you were liberated at Stalag lift 11 a um we've heard a lot of well coming I'm a Vietnam veteran but coming out of the Vietnam War and I believed it for a long time we thought the World War II veterans all came home to Big parades and Brass bands and cheering crowds and everything and everybody's seen the famous picture in New York of the sailor kissing the nurse and and that must have been the common experience for everybody right because there's a picture of it but it lasted for a day and you guys weren't there the typical experience for a World War II veteran was to come home not with their unit they came home alone or maybe with one friend they'd go to uh some uh post on the coast get some separation activity taken care of and then for the Army they'd be shipped most likely to Fort McCoy Wisconsin Camp McCoy in those days they'd out process for a day or two they'd get a ticket they'd go home they might have some small family get-together but generally the population at home was sick of the war and the soldiers returning soldiers would be greeted with you know we had a tough too we couldn't get tires for our cars and sugar was in short supply and everything and the guys hung up their uniforms got to know the woman they might have married years before maybe met their child for the first time and then started looking for a job or enrolling in school and they got on with their life does that summarize it guys pretty much okay uh one other story Bob Clemens on the end is joining us here he was a navigator on a B-17 flying out of fogia Italy 50 missions Bob would you talk about your axis Sally story it was somewhere uh was somewhere around the end of July the they asked me to lead the uh the uh fifth Wing in Italy we had six B-17 groups and uh our colonel was flying in the right seat in the lead plane and uh he had been in the 1936 Olympics he was an Olympic diver so he got to know access Sally and so uh we had to listen to German radio because they they played Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey and Jimmy Dorsey Music you know it was great well she came on and she said you know his name was Frank Kurtz she said Frankie uh we're we're waiting for you we were on our way to Budapest she said we're gonna get you when you get to Budapest and by the way that little pink face navigator from Minnesota we're gonna get him too foreign and I probably was pink faced because I was only 20 years old and that's that's a key summary of tonight's story I think he was 20 some of the others were 22 23. and if you think about what they were doing now at that age Bob Clemens was occasionally the lead Navigator so he'd have 25 30 planes flying behind him in each plane there's 10 men now maybe you know what's what's the 2000 uh 2010 equivalent value of B17 plenty of money uh okay 12 times a quarter of a million so he's got 25 or so planes behind him uh Mr stolo had hundreds of planes behind you sometimes right and you have all that responsibility now the planes have a monetary value which is huge but the crews have a Priceless value and at 20 22 23 they're responsible for all this and then they come home and who are they and so the question that I have is we send our young people off to war and we sometimes ask well do we ask too much of them when they go to war and my question is do we not ask enough of the Youth of our nation to challenge them in peace time when you look at what they're capable of doing in Wartime so should I leave it there and open it up to questions okay maybe I just add a little uh add a little uh footnote you know I think we all know the president Pope Pope Benedict XVI as you all know he is of German descent and when he was 16 years old as was all the German youth they were pressed into service and he served in an anti-aircraft unit station I think down somewhere down around Munich and two of our targets took us down very close to that area where he was supposed to have been in the station and we did get some Flack area down in there so who knows uh he might have taken a couple of pot shots at me and someday if I ever have a chance to have an audience with him I'll thank him for being such a lousy shot [Applause] how many planes went down in Switzerland and were they in turn there yeah that's a question which um has not received a great deal of publicity I talked to a actually the two interesting stories that come out of this uh um talk to a Swiss Air power historian they by the end of the war had collected 300 b-17s and b-24s in undamaged condition so there were some people who didn't stay the course and so maybe Catch 22 wasn't that far off in terms of his description of of guys now in terms of what did the bombing and the pressure put on the German economy do he told another story which I found fascinating the Swiss Air Force bought 50 bf-109 it's it's the correct designation not messerschmet 109 bf-109 in 1942 and they were still flying them in 1962 as a training aircraft um two years later having continued to sell huge amounts of of ball bearings and other things to the Germans to keep the German war economy afloat they bought another 50 uh bf-109s they junked them all in 1946 because they were so badly built now I think that's a very instructive uh indication of what had happened to the German war economy in two years Bob Clemens got two shots of whiskey after every one of his missions as a member of the 15th Air Force what did the eight Air Force guys get um were some of the German ball bearing factories owned by Americans um I don't think so um uh the corporations in the schweinford area were all German corporations GM did have some major factories in in Germany before the second world war the German government seized them all so I mean again I think the sort of the idea that somehow we didn't bomb certain things because they were American Property they were all the property of the German government by then and and uh um hey there wasn't much we didn't bomb big week was uh the first time weather cleared in the winter of 1944 in February 1944 and again in terms of how bad weather was bomber command had been bombing Berlin for starting in October of 1944 and they got their first photographs of the damage they'd done on Berlin in February of 1944 so they started bombing in October 43 and took them four months before they could get any photographs because the weather was so bad weather cleared over Germany and the whole series for about five or six days of huge air battles took place the official Air Force history uh uh the Army Air Forces argues that broke the luftwaffe it's very clear from the statistics that I showed you that's not true the luftwaffe unfortunately lasted for another uh two and a half months and it's not until April of 1944 that that they really began to to break apart and and the loss is then in made precipitously declined reportedly there's an area in the English Channel where bombers were instructed to drop their unreleased bombs if they went on unsuccessful bombing missions where they had to be aborted it for one reason or another because they didn't want to bring those bombs back fully loaded in land for the danger of the bombs going off as they're Landing so this area in the English Channel then was mapped out to a lot of the bombing Crews and according to a program produced by the public television here locally several years ago it indicated or it at least alluded to the possibility that it was during some of this these bomb droppings that Glenn Miller was I knew it from England to France and that his plane a small single engine plane was hit by one of these bombs that were dropped in that zone anybody here know anything about that uh his Pilot was in the in the transport Squadron that I was in he was flying a Norton Norseman it's the same engine as an at6 we speculate that what happened was that he was flying along fat dumb and happy all of a sudden he got carburetorized and was not didn't really know what he was going on and didn't turn on his carburetor heat and his engine quit and he just and that the reason I can say that is because that happened to me over England one time and I landed in a plowed field so they speculate that it was carburetor and ice and not necessarily any other kind of action than that I'm kind of curious as to what each of you did for a career afterwards did the pilots did you guys fly for Northwest or what did you guys do the pilots no everybody what did you do after the war well I got married and I had my wife right here with me for 63 years worth of marriage that's 40 years with me and this lovely wife had a radio that had a defective loudspeaker and so ice determined that I was going to fix it so in the convention to fix it I found out there was a need for a speaker recording company in Minneapolis and so I opened up a company called Minneapolis Speaker Company now called misco run by my son Dan who is here tonight also so that's been my career and I've had it's been a good career for me [Applause] well I want uh became a letter carrier and I spent 30 years at that and uh then I went out on a disability of my heart condition and my route was the last route I had was 18 years just east of Lake Como out here in St Paul so I walked all the time I could have been a clerk and and I could have been on a partial post route and all that but I I walked all the time and so that's the kind of work I did and then afterwards I did have after I had a couple of bypasses I went ahead 61 years old I I went ahead and took care of some vending machines for about 13 years so I had some part-time work thank you before he went in the service I was already enrolled at St Thomas because you remember the time I wanted to get into the college to Fly Navy but after the war I I did go back to school and I finally graduated from St Thomas and then 49. and then I went to into the insurance business after that and was in there for about 25 years and uh you know there were days I thought hey there's got to be an easy way to make a buck maybe maybe everybody feels that way in a job sometimes but uh it's when I joined the um Minnesota International Guard and that was in the uh Wing intelligence officer for quite a while and then I got rope it out of there because I was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel and if the roster didn't have room for me why you were you were out so then I uh joined the uh the Air Force Reserve so I spent about six years on active duty and almost uh 20 years in uh in the Air National Guard and the reserve I'm very happy I did too [Applause] I went out to Northwest Airlines and they said how much time you got and I said I've got 320 hours of twin engine they said we have men coming in here with 20 000 hours of four engine time so I didn't get to talk to anybody so a few of us started a little company out in Mound called Mound metal craft which turned into Tonka toy so as President Chief Executive Officer talking toys I got out of the service I joined my father in the heating sheet metal and air conditioning business until 53 years ago I went into the financial services business and I still work part-time at that um I didn't get a college degree until I was 58 years old I would just like to say something and I I think I will up here all you folks out there a big hand for all of your interests still shown to US veterans and uh and keep this thing going so he uh you owe yourself a big hand real quick it wasn't always uh serious we had some funniest that happened on my 20th Mission I was flying as a radio operator with a crew from another Squadron and when I got uh they apparently this the guy at a regular radio operator got sick just before Mission time so they got me out of bed give me a candy bar so you don't have any time for breakfast so away we go we'll go down to the flight line I've never knew any of these guys before and I got a board got into the radio room set up my equipment and the pilot comes on and he says radio operator I'm sorry I didn't get to meet you before the mission my name is Thomas Thompson this is my eighth Mission and I've had four crash Landings I said sir this is my 20th and I'm not looking for excitement but guess what happened we barely landed in France with a ball Turk uh dropped of course so he made a belly landing in France and that I've never gotten over Tommy Thompson's a legend in the 457th Bomb Group um actually we should give him a credit he was an ace of him our house uh yes uh gabreski colonel gabreski was in our group I knew him very well in fact I was at a seminar with him about four years ago when he got off the Beaten Track and he started talking about family and friends I finally got the microphone I said now you know why we call him Gabby it's worth noting that colonel gabreski was captured by the Germans on a low-level Mission uh he uh strafing a German field uh fighter field uh and he actually got a little too low so his prop chewed up the dirt and his plane came to a sudden halt leaving him in the hands of the Germans for as a guest of the German government for nine months the the Germans didn't have very good strategic bombers why didn't they develop a better strategic bombers why didn't the Germans develop a strategic bombers actually they did again a whole bunch of myths circulated after the second world war that it distorted our understanding um the Germans were developing a couple of four engine bombers in the mid-1930s that turned out to be uh the kindest word is Sitting Duck um top speed of about 120 miles an hour and virtually no decent bomb loads they then put their money on something called the he-177 which was an attempt to reduce the drag on a big bomber by putting uh um having just two missiles by welding two engines together and the British tried this with a bomber called the Manchester um and the problem with it is it just simply didn't work um uh the engines tended tended to decouple in Flight which then resulted in spectacular um fireworks display as the bomber and crew came to Earth um the British after one year of trying it quit and turned the land the Manchester into the Lancaster simply putting two the other two engines on uh into the cell so it became a four engine the Germans in their desire to prove that German engineering can do anything can't fix anything as any of you who own BMWs now and not till as late as 1944 we're still trying to make the the he-177 work we captured some of them and the flight reports was extra ordinary flying machine it just has still had engines that tended to decouple with obvious results and you know when you particularly when you have opponents trying to shoot you down you don't want your airplanes on their own to go out of the air how important was Herman gearing as chief of the luftwaffe in the German air war was he important or was he just a figurehead or was did he have any technical knowledge was the engineer uh Hermann Gering uh technology it's a World War One fighter pilot and he never outgrew being a fighter pilot unlike some fighter pilots who grow up and and become become the head of Corporations um uh he once was talking about the German radar system and he said I looked in it and it just looked like a bunch of wires um uh what of course he was was his sycophant of Hitler uh and uh um um basically echoed everything that Hitler wanted it and Hitler never understood the technological dimensions of War so um guring was a significant uh um impediment to German air power development after 1940 and played a major role in Allied Victory the the question is were the bombers used as bait to pull German Fighters away from the uh um Invasion I think that's what the question was um in effect the bombers in attacking the luftwaffe's factories in beginning in big week and in the March and uh and and engine factories um pull the luftwaffe up to defend its productive base and provided the targets which then the p-47s and the p-51s destroyed in these huge air battles so there's a certain amount of Truth in in the question um uh by May of 1944 the back of the luftwaffe had been broken and so the result uh um on D-Day is is that the Allied Forces flew something like Germans flew something like 85 sorties and the Allied number of sorties was somewhere over ten thousand as I remember it last week on channel two they've had a movie uh called the Battle of Britain and at the end of it they showed about a half a dozen British twin engine uh craft that were jet bombers I was under the impression that only Germans had jet propelled airplanes and they claimed that these British bombers actually went on bombing raids a couple of them before the war ended could you comment on that yeah it's it's this is of course you're talking about 44 45 yes the British um managed to put the meteor into production at the very very end of the war I I I'm not sure they actually flew on any active missions uh um both we and the British did not use the turbine flow engine which is what 262 was such a wonderful piece of Machinery again of course a German approach it was built like a Swiss watch and when you're up against people who are building uh uh millions of candy bars you got got a problem foreign we're way over time and I apologize for that guys if you could stay here for a couple of minutes and if people want to come up and ask them some questions that's fine thank you very much thank you for your service support for this program provided by viewers like you thank you additional support provided through the Catherine B Anderson fund of the Saint Paul Foundation upcoming Roundtable topics can be found at www.mn.ww.roundtable.org [Music] Production Services provided by barrows Productions [Music] [Applause]

Channel: World War II History Round Table

Views: 43,661

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Id: nnvOnWcoBgs

Length: 131min 56sec (7916 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 27 2022